The European Union has confirmed that any cooperation with Rybar would violate EU sanctions, as the head of Rybar is already sanctioned. Mikhail Zvinchuk was put on the EU sanctions list in 2023 for supporting actions that undermine and threaten the integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.

Automated replies on Rybar’s Telegram channel give the impression of talking to a real person, while offering journalists an online course on how to use the application in Russian.

Rybar has been expanding its influence beyond Russia’s borders for years. In April, it claimed that it had given a lecture to 500 people in the Republika Srpska and Serbia on how to manage channels on Telegram, an app that Russian propagandists have used almost exclusively since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, to circumvent sanctions and restrictions.

Rybar boss Zvinchuk has meanwhile visited Banja Luka in Republika Srpska at least twice and met directors of various government agencies, announcing further cooperation.

Automated responses from Rybar’s Telegram channel suggest this process of cooperation is still getting started, however.

After Detektor applied to attend the planned media school in Republika Srpska, Rybar responded, vaguely: “The school in the Balkans will open soon”, adding that it is “working on recruitment for online training in Serbian language.”

When Detektor repeated the question about the school, it did not receive an answer. Rybar instead offered an online course in Russian and sent a link to apply, adding that “you have to wait” for the course in Serbian. After that, Rybar stopped answering questions from Detektor.

Several people in Banja Luka say they received invitations for the course reportedly held by Zvinchuk for more than 500 people in Republika Srpska and Serbia. But Detektor has not yet found a single actual participant.

Journalist Aleksandar Stojanovic said he met Zvinchuk in Banja Luka, and was one of the invitees – but did not attend. “I was unable to attend the lecture and, as I was informed, the lecture was not held. I don’t know any other details,” Stojanovic told Detektor.

Rybar may have exaggerated the scale of its previous work in Republika Srpska, but the planned media school could give it an opportunity to strengthen its influence in Bosnia.

Olena Churanova, a Kyiv-based journalist for StopFake, which monitors disinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, notes that Zvinchuk is a former Russian army officer.

“Of course, now he says he doesn’t work [for the military],” she said. But she added that the Russian Defence Ministry likely provides much of the information the channel spreads.

‘Our expansion has reached a new level’

While it remains unclear whether the trailed lecture was actually held in the spring, the Republika Srpska government’s Agency for Information and Communication Technologies tied up with Zvinchuk and officially agreed to cooperate during his visit in June.

“Our expansion has reached a new level,” Rybar announced on June 17. “The head of Rybar and Drazen Visnjic, director of the Agency for Information and Communication Technologies, have agreed on cooperation in the Balkans within the media school and other joint projects,” it stated.

In July, the RS agency confirmed to Detektor that it would start cooperating with Zvinchuk. It did not answer additional questions submitted in mid-October about whether a contract had been signed.

“The agency … is working on drafting a cooperation agreement with Rybar media organisation from the Russian Federation,” it confirmed, stating that “opening a school for modern media” is among the goals.

Its response, signed by its director, said such media schools are crucial in modern society, and he considers improving knowledge of all types of journalism, including war journalism, a goal.

Trainings in five areas – digital journalism, multimedia production, marketing and social media, ethics and law in the media, data analysis and media analysis – are planned by the school, Detektor has found.

According to the RS agency, cooperation with Rybar forms part of its activities aimed at identifying international partners in order to strengthen the domestic media. It cited the EU as a model for this work. “In the EU, there are a number of initiatives that are directly and indirectly related to this segment,” it said.

However, Rybar’s founder is under EU sanctions not only for creating a media outlet “that spreads disinformation and pro-Russian propaganda.”

According to publicly available EU documents, Zvinchuk is also a member of a working group set up by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2022 to coordinate Russia’s mobilization in support of the war against Ukraine.

Rybar clearly sees Bosnia and Herzegovina as one of those fronts. In late summer, during the EU training force EUFOR’s annual exercise in Bosnia, Rybar published a map of Bosnia containing the exercise’s locations, along with the number of vehicles, aircraft and soldiers participating in it

Rybar linked the exercise to the visit of CIA Director William Burns to Sarajevo and Belgrade, and claimed that the exercises were a good excuse to increase the number of EUFOR troops on the ground in Bosnia.

The EU’s External Affairs Service in Brussels told Detektor that any cooperation with Zvinchuk would violate sanctions to which Bosnia has committed itself.

“Any cooperation between him, his associates and the Republika Srpska authorities would … be … a clear violation of the existing EU sanctions to which BiH has also committed,” Petar Stano, EU spokesman for foreign affairs and security, explained.

“The European Union has repeatedly recalled and emphasized Russia’s worldwide efforts to destabilize countries, including through coordinated information manipulation and interference in the Western Balkans countries. This is a very serious ongoing activity,” Stano added.

Rybar’s Telegram channel is followed by 1.3 million people. On it, Zvinchuk regularly denies the 1995 genocide of Bosniaks in Srebrenica, attributed to Bosnian Serb forces, and predicts war in the Balkans and Russia’s expansion to the Danube.

Among the first meetings held to lay the groundwork for the new school in Republika Srpska was one held at the Centre for Socio-Political Research, founded by the RS entity government.

According to the entity’s broadcaster, Radio Television of Republika Srpska, RTRS, in an article on Zvinchuk in April 2024, it was this centre that first invited Zvinchuk to Bosnia.

Centre director Dusan Pavlovic did not want to discuss the nature of the meeting with Zvinchuk with Detektor, however, which he called a “compromised” media outlet.

“After consultations with some of your colleagues from the media, it was shown that the media outlet for which you work is compromised in a professional sense because … you cooperate with foreign structures whose agendas are not well-intentioned for building and preserving coexistence and stability in BiH,” Pavlovic wrote.

In 2022, Pavlovic participated in a conference organised by the Gorchakov Fund in Moscow, which is also under European Union sanctions and seen as another tool to expand Russia’s “soft power.”

Among other things, the Gorchakov Fund has minimized war crimes committed during the 1992-5 war in Bosnia, including the genocide in Srebrenica.

A figure close to the Kremlin

Zvinchuk is a man closely associated with the official state apparatus in Moscow and acts as a megaphone for the Kremlin, according to experts.

In one article dedicated to Rybar, The Bell, a Russian newspaper critical of the Kremlin, claims there was a financial connection between Zvinchuk and the late Wagner paramilitary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The Bell notably revealed the identity of Rybar’s creator in November 2022. Until then, Zvinchuk and the partner with whom he founded the channel had long maintained anonymity.

Serbian analyst and digital forensic expert Natasa Kilibarda says that the “provision of information” is often a good clue to an organisation’s closeness to the Kremlin.

“Traces are visible in terms not only of the narrative but also the approach and provision of information. Where did the source of this information come from? Moscow and the Kremlin are the only trace that there could be. The placement of these narratives, the availability of information not available to anyone and perhaps traces of funding, although not clear enough, [fuel] a suspicion that they are funded by the Kremlin,” Kilibarda said.

One of the largest Telegram channels is well known in Ukraine for disinformation, especially since the beginning of the invasion in 2022. Although its content is blocked in free parts of the country and cannot be accessed without a VPN, Churanova said, disinformation that reaches the free territory is often Rybar’s product, transmitted by other channels and the media.

“Rybar is dangerous because it looks like a reliable source of information about the Russian side on the Ukrainian battlefield,” Churanova noted, recalling that Rybar reported that Ukrainian forces had bombed their own dam and killed those collaborating with the Russians.

Zvinchuk is not the only senior Rybar figure connected with the Russian military and authorities. Russian journalist Andrey Zatirko has been investigating people linked to Rybar since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Lithuania, where he fled after being declared a foreign agent in Russia and facing prison time.

Zatirko also cites Tatyana Kosterova, whom the US authorities also associate with Rybar. “In one piece of leaked information, she appeared as an officer of the military police of the Western Military District,” Zatirko said, adding that her husband, Alexander Kosterov, was described as a member of a Russian unit called “the 706^th Center for Information Warfare”.

Spreading Russia’s ‘experience in information warfare’

Rybar’s announcement of the opening of the media school came after Zvinchuk visited Republika Srpska and Serbia in spring, after his meeting at the Center for Socio-Political Research.

It states that Rybar and the RS government agency agreed on the holding of regular personal master classes with authors of Russian Telegram channels.

“Our goal is to show that you can do without Twitter/X, Facebook and Instagram. Russia’s experience in information warfare can and should be taken into account,” a Rybar post stated, among other things.

“Telegram is a platform that enables this for you … We have long studied the approaches of the West in waging information warfare against us. The time has come to apply our knowledge and train our associates in the right approaches and attract them to Telegram,” it added.

Olena Churanova describes Rybar as one of the main disinformation platforms Russia uses to control the information space in various countries. “At the moment, Ukraine is not even Russia’s main problem. NATO is Russia’s main enemy,” she pointed out.

“I’m already talking about this with my colleagues from Albania, where Russia is working on spreading the message that Albania must leave NATO and there is no point in being in it. Bosnia and Herzegovina also wants to join NATO, and it is very important for Russia to spread these messages – that there is no point in joining NATO. ‘It’s a weak alliance. You can see what’s happening in Ukraine. There is no help there.’ The Balkans is a very important region for Russia,” Churanova explained.

After, or just before, he visited Banja Luka, Zvinchuk went to Belgrade, where he held public meetings and classes of his school at the Hotel Moscow in Belgrade.

“In Belgrade, they [Rybar] have been engaged as experts in visual propaganda,” digital forensic expert Kilibarda said.

“What they have been doing since 2022 or 2020 is being marketed as a product, to teach journalists in this region to do similar things. They state that the participants are journalists, PR, civil servants, which in itself is extremely problematic.

“Are they so popular in the Western Balkans that they have many followers? No, but they have people who have media skills to spread this propaganda and Russian malign influence,” Kilibarda added.

On both occasions, the Belgrade “school” was attended by Vladimir Prebiracevic, director of the Majak Serbian-Russian Centre, who also runs a Telegram channel followed by 15,000 people, where news from Russia and the Ukrainian battlefield are predominant.

Churanova believes new proxies in the Balkans can help spread Russian propaganda.

“When the [Ukraine] invasion began, he [Zvinchuk] kept repeating that they had hired a lot of people from Ukraine to give them different information about where the Ukrainian army was, or where the weapons were located. So, he may not have had a base that works for Rybar, but he definitely had a network of people who just gave him information,” Churanova said.

In September, Rybar published photos and a text reporting that it had formed a school in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, in cooperation with Bishkek University.

Rybar meanwhile holds courses in several places in Russia itself. At the end of October, Rybar announced that Zvinchuk was giving lectures as part of the “Days of the Defence Ministry” at the State Institute of International Relations in Moscow, which is affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Rybar did not answer Detektor’s request for an interview by the time of publication.